It bypasses the crucial issue (Do cats paint?) and moves right to developing a theoretical construct about a phenomenon that has not yet gone through the formality of actually existing. "Why Cats Paint" is a sort of premptive strike of a title. The people who think it is funny will have a lovely book that will endure on a coffee table forever. The people who will think it is serious (and there will be many such people, I guarantee you) will perhaps start a new religion. But it has everything: Pictures of cats, paintings by cats, swell shiny pages, English-language text. It seems to me that "Why Cats Paint" is likely to make $50 million. Must be nice to have $60,000 a year just to keep your cat painted!Īs San Francisco Chronicle reviewer Jon Carroll observed in his review of the work at the time of its original release: The book these came from said some of the paint jobs cost $15,000 and had to be repeated every 3 months as the cat's hair grows out. Burton Silver and Heather Busch, authors of the 1994 coffee table book Why Cats Paint: A Theory of Feline Aesthetics, managed to pull off the double feat of creating a sly and hilarious send-up of both art books and cat books.
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